A Don’t-Know-What that They Keep Stammering s so of fi ia a 84 July 2007 18 Now here’s a new twist to the euthanasia debate that we maybe thought had nowhere else to run. It’s reported (Sunday Telegraph, 20th May) that some Australian pensioners are so keen to get their hands on the veterinary sedative Nembutal – current drug of choice, it appears, for a ‘good death’ – that they are sloping off to Mexico for it and smuggling it back in their smalls or their toilet bags. Others back home have succeeded in concocting a similar potion in back-garden tent laboratories. Well, you have to hand it to Aussie get-up-and-go! And courage, since these elderly criminals are facing jail if convicted.
According to Exit International, those involved outnumber by four or five times the membership of Sea of Faith (UK).
There are two main reasons why the British debate on the ethics of euthanasia gets aired for a while then flags. First, it is pretty generally accepted that legalised euthanasia will not ever get as far as the Statute Book. Secondly old age, senility or death – good, bad or just plain boring – tend to overtake the best and clearest thinkers before they achieve the means or opportunity of making their quietus as they would ideally choose. Australia has not opted to legalise either, but the majority of Nembutal smugglers and stirrers are said to be mainly ‘enjoying healthy and active lives.’ They are ‘adamant’ however ‘that they want the choice – and the means – to escape lingering, painful deaths.’ Even if we refuse the time of day to the ludicrous traditional arguments (that suffering and pain are in some way good for our souls, or that a god or goddess, such as Nature, should be allowed the freedom to dictate the malady and the fateful hour), there are good arguments against our being given or appropriating that choice. The burden of pressure on medics, friends or relatives to aid and abet suicide is one; the unpredictable ripple effects of one’s ‘chosen’ unaided suicide on those left behind is another.
But there are equally strong arguments for continuing to seek clearer understanding of what we can reasonably demand as the privileges, if not the rights, of being a thinking, sentient human. Some of the language used up till now, including the language of ‘rights’, may not indeed be very helpful. The concept of ‘dignity’ in particular is, arguably, quite inappropriate. In what ways can dignity ever be applicable to the death-bed, other than in romantic films? Enduring a common cold or dose of flu should be enough to prove that point to anyone, without recourse to contemplating the horrors and duration of more exotic ailments. Even the ambulant can forfeit dignity at the end of their lives – clothed, but no longer in their right mind. That can happen to any of us. I once presented a box of chocolates to a highly respected senior academic colleague whose brain tumour was about to kill him. It was just before his lunch, but he had the box open and was tucking in like a four-year-old. And the time for life-or-death choice, if choice had been available, was long gone. ‘I want to be in charge of my own death,’ a sixtysomething former teacher from Queensland is reported as saying. ‘I want to have the same degree of choice in dying that I have in living – independence and dignity and no pain.’ The practical reply would be, ‘Well you’d better hurry up and do the deed now.’ The painful reality, which has to be factored in, is that for most of us, when death seems to be on the cards, we are led perforce to places and situations where we have no wish to go. Yet pre-empting this pass, by any version of suicide, is normally read as some kind of cowardice. Or courage? Traditionally we’d project these oldies beyond the grave: ‘Ah but, if you hadn’t done it, the legal drugs could have worked their miracles. You might have had many more years in the merry old land of Oz.’ Well, yes, till the next time . . .